B4 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2020MEDIA | RETAILWendy Nguyen, a fashionable In-
stagram personality with 1.1 mil-
lion followers, is regularly tapped
by retailers like Macy’s and Ba-
nana Republic to promote their
wares on social media. They typi-
cally want her to take a stylish
photo in their apparel and enthuse
about their brand and any upcom-
ing sale or product line.
But Ms. Nguyen recently
fielded what she considered an
unusual and “very careful” inqui-
ry from Nordstrom. It wanted to
gauge her interest in a campaign
that would require visiting the
company’s seven-story flagship
store in New York to highlight
Nordstrom’s new safety measures
and “encourage people to experi-
ence what they built,” she said.
The subsequent Instagram
posts from Ms. Nguyen and a
handful of other influencers were
shared in the last two weeks and
offer a glimpse into pandemic-era
retailing and the ways stores are
trying to bring shoppers back in
person. The women, clad in trendy
clothing and masks, were pho-
tographed in unusual and notably
spacious parts of the store like the
Nordstrom x Nike sneaker bou-
tique, the so-called personaliza-
tion studio and a section dubbed
the “Beauty Haven.” (There was
one on an escalator.) The posts all
praised Nordstrom’s safety meas-
ures, like mandatory masks,
abundant hand sanitizer and ad-
herence to social distancing.Multiple posts mentioned being
able to shop “with peace of mind.”
One poster urged her followers to
“come explore an escape from the
city,” while Ms. Nguyen, who is
known on Instagram as
@wendyslookbook, wrote that
she hadn’t been out in months and
that the visit “was so refreshing.”
“In times of uncertainty, people
are going to find the people that
they trust the most to provide vali-
dation for the things that they’ve
loved doing in the past,” said
Krishna Subramanian, a founder
of the influencer marketing firm
Captiv8. He oversaw the Nord-
strom campaign and said that
other companies are also plan-
ning influencer campaigns fo-
cused on store safety.
Even before the coronaviruspandemic, retailers were strug-
gling to get more people into
stores. Now foot traffic to malls,
including outdoor shopping cen-
ters, is down about 30 percent
from last year, according to aggre-
gated data from the location anal-
ysis company Cuebiq, which
tracks about 15 million cellphone
users nationwide daily. It was
down as much as 57 percent earli-
er this year, as shutdowns essen-
tially ended in-person shopping in
many areas of the country.
By hiring influencers to high-
light safety measures, retailers,
especially those that sell apparel
and other discretionary goods, are
trying to restore a sense of nor-
malcy to activities like in-store
shopping that were utterly banal
six months ago but now may seem
dangerous to many customers.
Influencers are offering a re-
introduction of sorts with their
posts, Mr. Subramanian said.
“Remember that experience
you used to have on a weekly ba-
sis? Here’s how you do that
again,” he said in describing the
message of the posts. “We're not
all the way back to normal, but
here’s a step to that.”
The Nordstrom promotions ap-
peared to be unique to the New
York flagship store, a colossus
that opened its doors less than a
year ago. The pandemic forced itto close in March, but it opened
again on June 24. Mr. Subrama-
nian said he anticipated that influ-
encer marketing around safety
would remain local or regional be-
cause of the unpredictable nature
of the virus and the differing infec-
tion rates across the country.
Scott Meden, Nordstrom’s chief
marketing officer, said in a state-
ment that working with influenc-
ers was an important part of the
retailer’s marketing program and
that many of its customers look to
them for fashion and lifestyle tips.
“The health and safety of our
customers and employees is our
most important priority, and more
than anything, we want
customers to feel safe and com-
fortable shopping with us,” he
said. “For this campaign, partner-
ing with influencers is a way to
share their perspective on steps
we’ve taken in the way we serve
customers to help keep everyone
healthy.”
Ms. Nguyen, who also owns a
CBD shop in New York’s West Vil-
lage, said her followers appreciat-
ed her posts. Many said they had-
n’t realized the store was open and
they were glad it was still operat-
ing, given the number of stores
forced to close permanently.
Ms. Nguyen said working with
Nordstrom had left her cautiously
optimistic.
“The store openings can work if
we are all active participants in
how to protect others and our-
selves,” she said.Social Media Stars Tapped to Lure Anxious Shoppers
By SAPNA MAHESHWARI Wendy Nguyen’s recent Instagram
posts offer a glimpse into
pandemic-era retailing.AMR ALFIKY/THE NEW YORK TIMESThe changes the media faces
are profound, with technical and
political dimensions.
First, there’s already a shift
underway from a single-day,
in-person election. In the 2018
midterms, only 60 percent of the
votes were cast in person on
Election Day. More votes will
probably be sent in this year by
mail or cast in September and
October. That risks coverage
misfires: In 2018, cable news
commentators spent election
night suggesting that the “blue
wave” hadn’t arrived. But they
were simply impatient: The
Democratic surge showed up
when the final California races
were called weeks later. If the
2016 election had been conducted
amid the expected surge in mail-
in voting because of the coro-
navirus crisis, the Pennsylvania
results might not have been
counted until Thanksgiving.
Then, there’s the continuing
Trump-era political crisis, often
driven on Twitter and Facebook.
President Trump last Thursday
again sought to call mail-in vot-
ing into question with false
claims about fraud. If you want a
glimpse of how this could play
out in November, look to 2018,
when Mr. Trump tweeted the
suggestion, “Call for a new elec-
tion?” when the Republican
nominee for Senate in Arizona
fell behind as mail ballots were
counted.
These are hard challenges.
The media specializes in fighting
the last war, and has done a
decent job this cycle of avoiding
the mistakes of 2016. Reporters
are calling out Mr. Trump’s false-
hoods, showing skepticism about
polls and avoiding turning poli-
tics into a sport.
But the American media plays
a bizarrely outsize role in Ameri-
can elections, occupying the
place of most countries’ national
election commissions.
Here, the media actually as-
sembles the results from 50
states, tabulates them and de-
clares a victor. And — we can’t
really help ourselves — the me-
dia establishes the narrative to
explain what happened. That
task was most memorably mis-
handled in 2000, when inaccurate
calls that George W. Bush had
won Florida led to a wild retrac-
tion by Vice President Al Gore of
the concession he had offered to
Mr. Bush earlier that evening,
followed by weeks of uncertainty.
The flashy graphics and sober,
confident hosts embody a long
tradition of television flimflam.
When CBS invented the election
night tradition of dramatic vote
projections and official calls in
1952, it outfitted its set with a
blinking, Remington Rand Uni-
vac computer. The blinking de-
vice made for a good show. But
the computer was a prop, a fake,
as the historian Jill Lepore noted
in her podcast, The Last Archive.
The TV presentation is always
slick, but the underpinnings of
county-by-county electoral sys-
tems are baroque and antiquat-
ed. And the pandemic means
more people will vote by mail
this year, in states with little
experience processing those
votes.
“There’s a lot of planning for
the whiz-bang graphics, and not
enough planning for avoiding
undermining trust in the Ameri-
can electoral system,” said Bren-
dan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political
scientist and one of the authors
of an April report on how to run a
fair election during the pan-
demic. “It’s not going to be great
TV, it might not be viral content,
but it’s the truth.”
Some particularly wonky
journalists are trying to lay the
groundwork. NBC’s Chuck Todd
said in June that he has been
having “major nightmares”
about the election, and his First
Read newsletter has been refer-
ring to “election week” instead of
Election Day.
But at the highest levels of
most news organizations and the
big social media platforms, exec-
utives and insiders told me that
it simply hasn’t sunk in how
different this year is going to be
— and how to prepare audiences
for it.
Though the hosts and news
executives I talked to all take
preparations seriously, many
seemed to be preparing for this
election as they have for others
in the past, and some waved off
my alarmism.
“We don’t want to create aself-fulfilling prophecy of chaos
and confusion or suggest some-
how that that’s a preordained
outcome,” said the president of
NBC News, Noah Oppenheim.
Mr. Oppenheim’s optimism is a
bit hard to justify. The April
report on running a fair election
offers two recommendations for
the media, which it’s mostly been
ignoring. First, undertake anintense campaign to explain to
voters how the process will actu-
ally work this year. And second,
teach the public patience.
That’s not the media’s instinct.
CNN did the opposite this Febru-
ary, when the Iowa caucuses
were slow to report results and
the network put on a “count-up”
clock, impatiently tapping its foot
for a result and signaling that
there’s something wrong with a
slow, careful count.
Another, smaller but important
change that many political types
suggest: Get rid of the mislead-
ing “percent of precincts report-
ing” measure. In states like
Pennsylvania and Michigan, it
would be easy to have 100 per-
cent of precincts reporting their
Election Day results — but have
mail-in votes piled up in a ware-
house, uncounted.
There are some encouraging
signs. CNN and The Associated
Press, among others, have de-
voted far more reporting re-
sources than usual to informing
audiences just how electionswork and to lowering their ex-
pectations of quick results.
“It’s always an unfair standard
to expect that kind of movie-like
experience on election night,”
said David Scott, deputy manag-
ing editor at The A.P.
And CNN’s Washington bu-
reau chief, Sam Feist, and the
CBS News elections and surveys
director, Anthony Salvanto, both
told me they’ve moved away
from using the percent of
precincts reporting measure.
A top Times editor, Steve
Duenes, said The Times was
considering alternatives to the
single, predictive needle that
offered readers false confidence
in 2016, and is looking at a
“range of tools.”
But what the moment calls for,
most of all, is patience. And good
luck with that.
Nobody I talked to had any
real idea how cable talkers or
Twitter take-mongers would fill
hours, days and, possibly, weeks
of counting or how to apply a
sober, careful lens to the wild
allegations — rigged voting
machines, mysterious buses of
outsiders turning up at poll sites
— that surface every election
night, only to dissolve in the light
of day.
Facebook’s chief executive,
Mark Zuckerberg, told me in a
brief interview on Saturday that
he’s planning to brace his audi-
ence for the postelection period.
He said the site planned a round
of education aimed at “getting
people ready for the fact that
there’s a high likelihood that it
takes days or weeks to count this
— and there’s nothing wrong or
illegitimate about that.” And he
said that Facebook is consideringnew rules regarding premature
claims of victory or other state-
ments about the results. He
added that the company’s elec-
tion center will rely on wire
services for definitive results.
It’s possible, of course, that Joe
Biden will win by a margin so
large that Florida will be called
for him early. Barring that, it’s
tempting to say responsible
voices should keep their mouths
shut and switch over for a few
days to Floor Is Lava, and give
the nice local volunteers time to
count the votes. That, however,
would just cede the conversation
to the least responsible, and
conspiratorial, voices.
The Republican secretary of
state of Ohio, Frank LaRose, said
he hoped that the time spent
waiting for results could become
a kind of civics lesson, with
footage of volunteers feeding
ballots into machines. Alex Padi-
lla, the Democratic California
secretary of state, suggested that
television companies look to a
Hollywood model: “You can’t
think of Election Day as a single
movie — you have to treat it as
maybe a trilogy,” he said.
He didn’t say which movie.
But conveniently, a group of
former top government officials
called the Transition Integrity
Project actually gamed four
possible scenarios, including one
that doesn’t look that different
from 2016: a big popular win for
Joe Biden, and a narrow electoral
defeat, presumably reached after
weeks of counting the votes in
Pennsylvania. For their war
game, they cast John Podesta,
who was Hillary Clinton’s cam-
paign chairman, in the role of Mr.
Biden. They expected him, when
the votes came in, to concede,
just as Mrs. Clinton had.
But Mr. Podesta, playing Mr.
Biden, shocked the organizers by
saying he felt his party wouldn’t
let him concede. Alleging voter
suppression, he persuaded the
governors of Wisconsin and
Michigan to send pro-Biden
electors to the Electoral College.
In that scenario, California,
Oregon, and Washington then
threatened to secede from the
United States if Mr. Trump took
office as planned. The House
named Mr. Biden president; the
Senate and White House stuck
with Mr. Trump. At that point in
the scenario, the nation stopped
looking to the media for cues,
and waited to see what the mili-
tary would do.Rethinking Election Night Before the Media Falls Flat
Trump supporters on election night
in 2016, above left. A screen
displaying the electoral vote count
on Nov 8, 2016, in Times Square.
Left, verifying ballot signatures last
week in Miami before the Aug. 18
primary.DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES GEORGE ETHEREDGE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESLYNNE SLADKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS‘The nerds are
freaking out.’
Brandon Finnigan, the founder of
Decision Desk HQFROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE
Lord & Taylor, the floundering de-
partment store company that
traces its roots to 1826, on Sunday
became the latest retailer to file
for bankruptcy protection as the
coronavirus outbreak accelerates
the demise of chains that were al-
ready teetering.
The chain was acquired last
year by the clothing rental start-
up Le Tote in an unusual $100 mil-
lion deal. Now Le Tote and Lord &
Taylor are both seeking Chapter
11 protection from their creditors
in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for
the Eastern District of Virginia.
The companies said in a filing
on Sunday that they operated 38
locations, which had been tempo-
rarily closed since March 2020. A
representative for Le Tote and
Lord & Taylor did not immedi-
ately respond to a request for
comment.
Lord & Taylor’s origins date
back to 1826, when Samuel Lord
and George Washington Taylor,
both English immigrants,
founded a dry goods store in Man-
hattan’s Lower East Side neigh-
borhood. It opened its second
store in 1853 and a third in 1860.
The famed flagship location on
Fifth Avenue in New York opened
in 1914 and had a concert hall with
a built-in pipe organ and several
dining rooms.
But in recent years the chain,
which was previously owned by
Hudson's Bay, the owner of Saks
Fifth Avenue, had been strug-
gling. The chief executive of Hud-
son’s Bay had said that the chain
was in the fraught “middle” space
among retailers — neither high-
end luxury nor discount apparel.
Hudson’s Bay had sold the
chain’s iconic New York flagshipbuilding to WeWork, and at one
point even started selling its
goods on Walmart’s website.
Then came the Le Tote deal,
which was an unexpected gamble
from a San Francisco tech start-
up. Le Tote agreed to pay $100
million in cash for Lord & Taylor’s
brand and inventory and take
control of 38 stores and the
chain’s online operation. But Hud-
son’s Bay would continue to own
Lord & Taylor’s real estate and
cover Le Tote’s rent at those prop-
erties for three years. The deal
closed last November.
Le Tote envisioned reviving
Lord & Taylor and expanding its
own fortunes by persuading its
30-something, city-dwelling
customers to visit the chain’s
stores, and getting the core Lord
& Taylor target customer, a subur-
ban woman around the age of 50,
to try Le Tote.
But that plan was complicated
by the coronavirus outbreak,
which has had an outsized effect
on brick-and-mortar retailers,
particularly those which were
forced to shut stores as part of
state and city lockdowns.
Since the beginning of May, a
number of household name com-
panies have filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcy to shed debt and get
out of costly leases, including
Neiman Marcus, J. Crew, J.C. Pen-
ney, Brooks Brothers and the
owner of Ann Taylor and Loft.Lord & Taylor
And Its Owner
Latest To File
For Bankruptcy
$100M
What Le Tote paid to acquire Lord
& Taylor in an unusual deal.A retailer traces its
roots back to 1826. Its
Fifth Avenue flagship
opened in 1914.
By SAPNA MAHESHWARILord & Taylor was acquired last
year by the clothing rental start-up
Le Tote.BRUCE BENNETT/GETTY IMAGESOther points of view
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seven days a week.
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